Life & Wisdom Quote by James Ellroy

Ellroy’s brag lands with the blunt, slightly bruising candor you’d expect from a novelist who built a brand on moral rot and hard-boiled swagger. “Wider circle” sounds like wholesome growth, but he immediately itemizes the new audience in a way that both flatters and needles it: “More women, more middle class people.” It’s market talk dressed up as confessional, the writer sizing up the room the way one of his cops sizes up a suspect.

The intent is part self-report, part provocation. Ellroy isn’t just noting expanded reach; he’s highlighting the social categories that supposedly didn’t belong to him before. The subtext: his work used to be for a narrower tribe - crime obsessives, noir purists, maybe the kind of reader who romanticizes masculine brutality. By naming women and the middle class, he acknowledges that his books have crossed into audiences stereotyped as more “respectable” or less tolerant of the uglier pleasures his fiction traffics in: misogyny as atmosphere, violence as texture, history as conspiracy.

There’s also a faint sneer in the taxonomy. “Women” and “middle class” are framed like demographics on a sales sheet, not communities of readers. That’s classic Ellroy: a refusal of literary piety, an insistence that art and commerce are tangled, and that cultural legitimacy often arrives disguised as a broadened customer base. The line works because it’s simultaneously a victory lap and a dare: if you’re joining the fan club now, are you prepared for what you’re applauding?